Unless you’re independently wealthy and have no need of money, you’re going to need to work. When we look around at the work Catholics are doing, we often find them doing things that aren’t worthy of Catholic workers. How many Catholic women are going to try to sell essential oils or kitchen gadgets? How many Catholic men are going to work for secular companies? Why not work for an end that both provides income and serves a virtuous cause?
The Catholic Church teaches that the role of the laity is to direct temporal affairs according to the will of God. The Catechism reads:
“It belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will…It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 898
Two important areas of this work are found in marketing and sales, which many Catholics tend to shy away from. These works are seen as dishonest or “worldly” because of examples known of non-Catholics who do them. These, however, are crucial means by which we may direct temporal affairs according to the will of God.
Marketing
In modern society, we have become accustomed to the impersonal cold calls of telemarketers and spam mails that fill our inboxes and think of this as “marketing”. Or, we imagine obnoxious commercials on television urging us to “Call now!” and order some goofy new product. These examples are a kind of marketing, but the bad kind. Marketing is much more useful than this–and extremely important in the right context.
Marketing is the means by which we promote necessary changes in the world. Marketing is the work that’s done to teach people how to solve the problems they face. Catholic marketing is the attempt to promote Catholic culture by all means available to us, and often, tools and techniques developed by secular society can help us do this.
The goal of marketing is to connect with people who desire to solve their problems and lead them to the solution. The goal of marketing is to create “leads” that are then handed on to “salesmen” who can help them find the exact solution they need for their unique circumstances.
Sales
As with marketing, our idea of “sales” has been wrongly influenced by dishonest men who try to force us to buy things we don’t want or need. We have experienced high pressure tactics to close a deal, usually based on false claims and threats of lost opportunities. The car salesman trying to quietly slip some unnecessary insurance plan into the fine print, or the cashier trying to get you to sign up for the store credit card you don’t want give us a bad taste of what it means to be a salesperson.
Sales, however, in an honest sense, is the work of helping people who are interested in solving their problems to find the perfect solution. It does not have to be dishonest or pressuring. It can be sincere and generous. Catholic people have to learn to be good, honest, helpful salespeople because people have problems and need help finding the solutions to them. They don’t know what products and resources are available and they have a hard time making final decisions of what to do. Good salespeople help them through these decisions.
PROMOTING CHANGE IN CATHOLIC EDUCATION
When we understand that the desire to promote change in any area of life is done through marketing and sales, we find endless opportunities to help our neighbors and to earn honest income. We don’t need to market and sell junk. We can market and sell important, valuable products and services–and be rewarded justly for doing so. Both the people providing the products and services and the people who need them depend on people working in marketing and sales.
We all know that change is needed in Catholic education. That doesn’t mean, however, that we need to start schools or become teachers. Very few people can do that work and it’s best to allow them to do it. To promote change in Catholic education, Catholic men and women can help by working to market and sell classical Catholic education.
This requires, first of all, that they study to learn about the problems in modern education and how classical Catholic education can solve them. They have to learn about the products and services available to Catholic families. They have to learn about how these products and services can be made affordable to families, whose financial resources are limited and vary greatly. They have to learn how to connect with families who need help using modern communication tools and platforms. They have to work with a program like the Classical Liberal Arts Academy to agree on rewards for this help, which is usually provided through commission which rewards the marketing and salespeople with a portion of the cost of the products and services purchased.
When they learn to do this work, they will play an important role in the actual work of promoting change in Catholic education. They can devote their lives to this work and find very satisfying rewards, both financially and morally.
Until Catholics learn to think beyond the false dilemma of “worldly work” and “spiritual work”, many problems will be left unsolved in our society. Most Catholic people will imagine that because they are not the inventors or craftsmen or experts, they simply have no part to play in providing the solutions–but this is false. The work of marketing and sales is crucial for change in our society and it’s an area where Catholic laymen had failed to seize the opportunities. They’ve been willing to sell knives and insurance for money, but not the most important products and services that are needed. There is work for everyone in bringing change to our society, but we have to understand and fill our roles in that work.
In the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I offer 20% commission on all of our online courses to anyone willing to do the work of marketing and sales. This work allows me to devote all of my time and energy to preparing lesson content and working with students, which is the core work that I need to do. I am also willing to provide helpers with coupon codes that help them promote our courses and make them more affordable to more families. This essential work in changing Catholic education for the better and, while I have done it for 15 years, doing so negatively affects the Academy’s work and takes away from the needs of students.
I receive offers from secular marketing and sales companies asking me for the opportunity to provide this help, but I don’t want it from non-Catholic sources. I received one such offer this morning, in which a man wrote:
“I don’t know if you have open space to take on new students at the moment for the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, but we do marketing and sales campaigns entirely on a commission basis–no deposits, retainers or anything like that. We can generate our own leads and close all the sales, you would simply need to take good care of the students once we’ve enrolled them.”
Why can’t Catholic laymen think and work like this?
God bless,
William C. Michael, Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
